Flipped sex roles in pipefish, seahorse topic of U of I research
October 21, 2020
If seahorses are the ampersands of the fish world, pipefish are the long dash — with a snout. The small, slim fish that live in tropical and frigid waters around the globe have been Adam Jones’ target of study for decades.
Jones is a biology professor at the University of Idaho, not a linguist, although he reserves choice words for the Syngnathidae, the family of fish that include seahorses and pipefish. “They're pretty interesting,†said Jones, who operates the Jones Lab in U of I’s Department of Biological Sciences. The male and female versions of pipefish — they average about 7 inches — change sexual roles, which means that the male pipefish are impregnated with the female’s eggs. Males carry the developing embryos in a pouch, with a placenta-like connection between father and offspring, until the young are released.
“That’s pretty weird if you think about it,†Jones said. The Jones Lab recently received two grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) valued at about $1.5 million to further research how sexual selection and sexual conflict — which gives rise to different characteristics in males and females — affect the genome. Combined, the studies will last four years.